Bill Gates predicts Internet to revolutionize TV in 5 years
 

Nows the time to put your thunkin caps on folks..

We are truly at an amazing time period as far as shifting technology.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070127/...internet_tv_dc

Get in now or be lost in the crowd..

Speaking of bill gates, isn't it quite amazing that the richest guy in the world ( i think ) made his entire fortune in his lifetime.

This might be wrong but i bet its the first time in human history the richest man built his entire wealth based on his own actions/money not his/her families money..

Quite amazing when you think about it..

Howard Hugues had some money from his father's business, but most of it was his own...

good point , didnt think about him , but he did start with millions of $ from his dad when he died ( in his teens )

Shit people were saying this almost 10 years ago. Bloomberg had a big thing about it... I even blabbed on about it when I spoke at the Garden in I think it was 98. It was obvious to a lot of people back then but now with things like FIOS I guess the infrastructure is approaching the point where it can support it.

Look at stuff like cbs.com/innertube or ABC's video online. It's great pulling up shows on demand and the way they run advertising it can lead righ to an online impulse buy.

Imagine the day your TV is as interactive as your PC and you are watching a show... you get an ad at some point for some item you are interested in so you leave the show suspended while you go out to the product site, get a video cam of a sales rep, ask your questions and order the item then return to the show. Neat shit.

:thumbsup :thumbsup now lets find a way to be the first to get this done :)

Microsoft will miss the train again then.
The skype creators new thing will be huge and it won't take 5 years.

I'm not that smart. =]

I've wanted to do a internet TV station for a long time.. I've always thought that once B/W limitations are done with, the big TV stations will soon start broadcasting on the web.

I mean think of how many more people they could reach via advertisements online vs just on a cable station.

I've got some ideas I've been toying around with on how to get orginal content but it takes money.

Bill is 5 steps ahead thanks to the XBox 360. Some of the deals they just cut with Hollywood puts him in position.

Bill Gates needs to adopt me.:thumbsup

It think it's pretty cool .... *nix that* :)

On a side note, Bill said we'd be done with email spam by now. I'm not banking off what Bill says, rather what other's are doing. Live TV broadcasts via the internet can already exist.

I am very excited to see what Microsoft comes up with next.

And I'm "sure" he will :winkwink:

We love Bill Gates !!!!

Bill if your reading this : "Thank you thank you thank you"

I think this story is quite a bit better. There was these 2 kids from stanford that created a search engine.... I forget the name, but I think they've made a pretty penny. I think these kids actually created a solid product and have a sense of morals/ethics.

Yeah, damn bill gates. Altho he needs 3x to 4x the bandwidth to stream the same quality HD i stream.

video? internet?

NOOOO!!!!

i predicted this in 1988....wow, good job bill :thumbsup

Oh common don't get me started on the google "do no evil"-gimmick...
They are just as greedy as gates or any other serious enterprenuer and the rest is marketing and spin.

Convergence has been a buzz word since I started in the net business... a long freaking time ago.

All of the predictions that the internet is going to revolutionize TV make one single, huge, and somewhat overwhelming mistake:

You can't reach the masses if you expect them to pay for every TV show, and without masses, you can't make TV shows that cost millions of dollars a week to produce.

The InternetTV model basically means no more Grey's Anatomy, no more CSI, no more Law and Order... instead replaced with variations of http://www.newsforblondes.com and Youtube.

The glroy of mass broadcast media is it's ability to reach EVERYONE, all of the time, for very little net cost to the consumer. The more the consumer pays for the right to watch your shows, the less advertising the consumer will tolerate overall. Broadcast means that people can go to WalMart and buy a $39 TV right now and watch CSI tonight. That is a huge hump for IPTV or any other product to overcome.

There are things that the internet just isn't as good at. The internet does long tail stuff great... back catalog stuff. But the costs involved in producing modern day TV just don't permit the networks to move to a pay per view model to make it work. If they thought they could have, they would have joined HBO a long, long time ago collecting monthly fees.

You can't take the mass out of mass media.

I actually think they could make WAY more money using the internet. Being able to track things you could charge advertising in a totally different way, target specific audiences based on age/sex/interests/location.

Nice post.

But how exactly are you going to advertise? People watching a television show on the internet don't want to be distracted with a bunch of bullshit ads everywhere. They would even prefer to watch full screen if possible. So how do you implement the ads?

Though I see your points, there's a lot of trends pointing to the computer as being the primary "friend". Some reports mention that people spend more time with their computer than their significant other. Other reports mention that the TV, in some households, is no longer the center of attention; rather the laptop(s) / desktop around the house.

I don't see internet & TV merging tomorrow, but it will happen. Just the fact that YouTube sold for so much, that anyone can publish whatever they want in video so easily ( the flash plugin has an embedded video ripper ), and that there's a growing world-wide population out there begging for stupid shit -- TV and internet will merge, sooner than later.

Just look at cable / satellite TV. Big dish is history. Cable is in. It's an evolution happening, and though there's sure to be a lot of bumpy roads with large companies trying to lobby for that one, huge "steak", regardless, it's going to happen. There was even a CNN article today about the WII bringing news channels to it's subscribers.

*shrug*

You must be pretty naive or at least cant see what google done and is doing...

the days of "Google will save us all" are long gone...

Apparently Gates missed Steve Jobs annoucenment a few weks ago.

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

Yea but they charge like $400 or something...

I think the future is television networks as dot coms...just streaming their programs all day with some kind of targeted advertisements.

Howard Hughes used the tool company that his father started and which he inherited to fund all his other ventures, most of which lost money.

Something that is happening now will go miles towards defining how this whole things progress. There are a few cable companies that are offering service Ala Carte. That is you pay a flat few of a few dollars a month as a service fee then you pay a certian amount each month for each channel you want. So for example if you can decide all you want is CNN, ESPN, MTV, TNT and NBC and those will be the only channels that you get and the only channels that you will have to pay for. I would imagine that a lot of the smaller channels will disappear because they get viewers, but how many viewers will be willing to pay for that channel?

If we find that most people won't pay even a small amount to subscribe to the smaller niche cable channels, then I would safe it's safe to say that much internet based TV will have a hard time exisiting or producing qualtiy programing.

wtf ? we must be talking about a different search engine..

you mean the one that copies my site and redisplays it withoutmy permission ? The one who takes all my images without permission often giving the credit to other people ?( remeber when hotlinking was the biggest no-no on the net ) The one who wanted to cut authors out of royalties for books by copying libraries ?

I agree they have made alot of money , Thats about as far as i'll agree on that :winkwink:

There isn't much more money to be made, because the first thing you are doing is cutting your potential viewership down to next to nothing (statistically) and attempting to make money on a sort of long tail play (especially hoping that people will come back and pay to watch a show again 1 year later, example).

No matter how NARROW you can target your ads, you cannot make up for the masses that you will lose. Coca-cola advertising isn't going to be hugely different between me and the guy down the street. But in the internet model, you would have to stream an ad for each one of us. Coca-Cola and McDonalds and a whole bunch of other companies meet exactly the mass market advertising model and make network TV work. Without a mass to sell to, they aren't going to pay.

Most people aren't going to pony up $1 to watch a TV show... and they certainly won't put in the type of hours they do now in front of the idiot box. That is where the real money is made, with people who turn the TV on when they get home from work and stay about glued to it until they sleep. All those ad views are what makes things go around. Asking those same people to pay, I don't know, $150-$300 a month extra to see the same shows isn't going to work out (figure $1 per half hour... 6 shows per day average, more if they like football or hockey)... plus pay for a pretty darn high speed internet connection to be able to get the stuff (and pay the excess bandwidth, because they are going to use gigs and gigs of transfer).

The current broadcast model, especially the network affiliate model, allows advertisers already the chance to customize their messages based on regions (perhaps running a local sports star, celeb, or personality), without forcing the end user to own an expensive computer and to pay for a very high speed net connection just to watch your show.

Joost, the file sharing P2P think form the kazaa and skype guys is said to run at about 500kbs... to get quality similar to current SD broadcast. 30 meg a minute. 1.8 gig an hour... say 4 hours per night? Call it 7 gig a day. 210 gig a month. Someone is going to pay for the bandwidth.

[QUOTE=StickyGreen;11803089They would even prefer to watch full screen if possible.[/QUOTE]

Watch the Pirates trailer in my sig.

After reading your replies, you've given me a great idea.

Nice! :thumbsup Does that use a lot of bandwidth?

Bill Gates: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

The file is 27mb, for 1m 43 seconds. Which works out to be aprox 15mb per minute. Thats at 2200 bitrate for 720p footage.

2200 is a bit overkill in my opinion tho, 1800 looks great. It would depend what your watching, i would say 1800 for a sitcom, 2200 for a football game.

Well the standard def footage on my preview page is 680k, which looks crystal clear when you stream it onto a standard def TV.

But scaled up to my screen, 1600x1200, it maintain the sexiness. 1200bitrate for standard def scaled is acceptable to anyone IMHO.

He was talking about memory, and he said it in 1981.

Didn't Gates say in 1992 that the internet was only a fad? Wasn't that why MS was so slow to bring out IE that it's first version was 3.0 so that it looked comparable to Navigator 3.01 Gold? Personally I won't put much stock in his prognostications. :2 cents:

He denies saying that though. Google it and you'll see what I'm talking about.

One of his more profound quotes was:

On code stability, from Focus Magazine
Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft
hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone
calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to
be user mistakes.
[...]
I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes.
The reasons for updates are to present more new features.